November and Mid Term Break Poem Analysis

Mid-Term Break, by Seamus Heaney, is a free-verse poem that portrays the event in which the speaker, who came back from boarding school, deals with the loss of a young brother. In this poem there are several important themes such as clip, age, family, pain, love and most of all death. This poem takes the earreach along on the speakers journey to accepting his microscopical brothers death. The author used a number of imagery to depict the themes of the poem. In these imageries, Heaney challenges non only the audiences visual imagery but as swell up as auditory, olfactory as well as emotional imagery.For example Counting bells knelling classes to a close, the corpse, stanched and candles soothed the bedside. Throughout the poem, Seamus Heaney only used simile once to compare the coffin to a cot, He lay in the intravenous feeding foot box as in a cot. The poem is organised with three lines per stanza in which there are no specific rhythm or rhyme pattern. However the last word in the poem rhymes with the last word in the stanza before. Seamus Heaneys choice of words in this poem is what do the poem so special.The phrase it was a hard blow and the line about the cooing baby bring certain awkwardness to the poem. Also the word soothed brings a certain warm feeling to the poem. However this word is besides words that are associated with mourning and death such as bedside, candles and Snowdrops These choices of words bring the audience on a emotional rollercoaster. Moreover, the authors choice of words once more highlighted the last line. Heaney used alliteration, assonance and repetition to add pull ahead emphasis on the four foot box Which suggests how important this line is to the core of the poem. The poem November By Simon armitage is about how a man , the speaker, copes with the loss of a family member, non through death but through age.The speaker and a man named John (probably a friend) have taken Johns nanna to a nursing home. They know she wil l not come back out of the home. When they leave the honest-to-god lady, they drive back to Johns endure and drink alcohol, to cope with the emotions of the situation. The poet tries to lift John out of his depression. As with all poetry, the poem captures the interest of the reader through its exploration of human feelings and motivations.The choice of November as the title is effective in that this is clearly the winter of the grandmothers life, which is drawing to its close. There is little, if anything, that is attractive about the month of November the weather is bad, and certainly not picturesque, and the dismal and dank darkness which we associate with the month reflects the feelings experienced by the poet and John in the light of the old ladys decline. In Stanza 1, the personal effects of ageing on the grandmother are shown by the way she walks she takes four short steps to every two taken by the poet and John.Stanza 2 shows the factual affection and care John lavishes upon his grandmother, making sure that she has all she needs, as well as mementoes of home family trinkets he is trying to cater for her emotional, as well as her physical, needs. The obvious closeness of the relationship is reflected in the fact that he pares his grandmothers nails quite an intimate act for a grandson to carry out. However, the old lady has degenerated into an object, as John wraps her in the rough blankets.The reference to the old ladys incontinence provides the reader with a clear indication of her helplessness, and wherefore she has had to go into a nursing home. Stanza 3 begins with a play on words, It is time John. this could mean that it is time to leave the old lady, or that it is the passage of time and hence the ageing process which has brought things to their current situation. The stanza focuses on the lack of fictional character of life of old people they are drained of colour, their bodies show signs of ageing let up breasts and baldness and they are losing their mental faculties stunned rains.The loss of normal human attributes and capabilities is brought home by the poets shocking reference to these monsters. Stanzas 4 and 5 concentrate on the aftermath, emotionally, of leaving the grandmother in the home, no doubt Johns main feeling being one of guilt, and the final stanza is an attempt to lift the emotions of the reader and of John by giving a message of expediency, but one which is positive for the younger men.The poem is written in free verse and contains little rhyme. The poem is constructed of six stanzas, the first five of three lines each, the last of only two lines. The first three stanzas focus on the nursing home, leading up to a crescendo at the end of Stanza 3 with these monsters. throughout these stanzas, the poet is reassuring John, despite feeling repulsed by the images of the elderly in the home.Both Poems are effective in their exploration of the emotions of sadness and guilt felt by relatives and friend s when the passing years lead to a loved one losing all sense of dignity and quality of life. The choices of language and literary devices are very appropriate and served their purpose. In November, the speaker tells of the loss of a family member, not through death, but through age, using rude language to put the point across while Mid Term break attempts to do the same, in a more bitter sweet way.